Happening This Weekend

On Saturday, September 30, Michael Saltz, author of the memoir The Winding Road: My Journey Through Life and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, will be appearing at the Copake Grange, where he will be interviewed by Tom Chulak, the former owner of the Chatham Bookstore, and will answer questions from the audience about journalism, politics, and whatever anybody wants to bring up.

In the summer of 1975, famed newsman Robert MacNeil left London and the BBC for New York City to begin preparations for a new news program scheduled to debut in the fall. There he met Michael Saltz, a production manager for WNET-TV, who had begun planning for the show two months before MacNeil's arrival. Thus began the production of The Robert MacNeil Report, which soon evolved into The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, then The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, followed by The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and finally The PBS NewsHour. Through all the changes over the years, the show gained a devoted audience and is widely regarded as the most trusted and fair source of TV news in America.

Saltz's position on the show evolved as the show evolved, from the show's production supervisor in 1975 to senior producer soon after the program expanded to its one-hour format in 1984. As senior producer, he was responsible for creating some of its most innovative and creative programming segments: newspaper editorial cartoons voiced by a group of improvisational actors, book reviews, the highly regarded "Road Series" (short documentary pieces about creative people), and, most importantly, the unique essay segment of the NewsHour, serious commentaries about life, politics, history, and cultural issues in America. The essays, which Saltz produced until he retired in 2009--some 1,500 of them--won numerous awards, including an Emmy and two Peabody Awards, the most prestigious awards in television. Throughout his career, Saltz traveled extensively throughout America, going to approximately forty-five states, as well as to some of the hot spots of the world--places like South Africa, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, Panama, the Soviet Union, Libya, and Iran.

Saltz began visiting Columbia County in 1952 at the age of 12, when his parents bought a vacation house on Copake Lake. He was a frequent visitor until 1990 when he and his wife bought their own house in Copake (or Hillsdale, depending on how you look at it) and became part-time residents of the county. Saltz has lived here full-time for the past seven years, now accompanied by his wife, after her retirement, and Max, their bullmastiff.

Starting in 2018, he wrote op-ed essays that frequently appeared in the Register-Star. In one of those essays, Saltz had nice things to say about The Gossips of Rivertown. Later, I had the privilege of meeting Saltz and becoming acquainted with him and Max at the Hudson Dog Park. These days, he publishes his essays in a blog on Substack.com and on imby.com. 

 

Saturday's event at the Copake Grange will start at 4:00 p.m. and is free to attend. The Grange is located at 628 Empire Road, in the center of Copake. Saltz's memoir will be available for sale at the event, through the Chatham Bookstore.